“Wyatt, you’re a genius! It’s perfect.”
Uh-huh—for the next half hour.
Club Med owned an immense old resort hotel built in the 1920s that had been one of the main reasons I’d chosen to go there: in the photographs it looked exactly like Sophie’s description of her dream getaway hotel.
But about thirty minutes after passing through the front door, we knew we’d made a serious mistake. Children ran shouting and screeching through the lobby and corridors as if either they or the hotel was on fire. Instructors and staff buzzed around like smiling zombies on methedrine—organizing, directing, telling you what to do, where to go, asking why when you weren’t out skiing, sledding, skating, signing up for the many splendid things the Club offered. At all meals they told you where to sit. If you had the unimaginable cheek to say you didn’t want to sit there, the smiles slid off their faces in an instant, like slush down a windshield, and they became nasty as only the French can be. The brochures had made it sound good-natured and relaxed. Far too quickly we discovered it was both hyper and vaguely fascistic. By the end of the first day we were calling it Club Dread.
Yet we found our way through the week there because the landscape was stunning and we thoroughly enjoyed being with each other. We hiked, went sledding, watched skiers shush down the sides of white on blue-black mountains. It snowed every day, and every afternoon we walked together a little farther up the trails that led into even deeper snow and silence.
We were resting on a black bench in the middle of a snow field eating tangerines warm from our pockets when Sophie first spoke of the idea.
“Nothing smells up here but the fruit. Did you notice that? Down below you smell the trees and the dung from the barns, but here it’s only these. So pungent and out of place, isn’t it? I love it when my hands are full of the scent. Dick and I were eating oranges in bed one morning. Before I realized what he was doing, he took up the peels and began rubbing them all over my body. They were cold and smooth. It was delicious. I smelled so wonderful. Then we made love, of course. The whole room was a perfume of sex and oranges. I’ve never eaten one since without remembering that morning.
“Wyatt, I heard something last night that got me thinking. I wanted to talk to you about it, but held off ‘cause I wanted to think it through first. Don’t say I’m nuts till I’ve finished.
“After dinner when I was waiting for you in the lobby, there was a man telling a little girl a story. He was speaking English, so it was kind of hard not to listen. It was the fairy tale about the man who goes fishing and catches a flounder, but it convinces him to throw it back in return for three wishes. Remember that story?”
“Yes, ‘The Fisherman and His Wife.’ I did it on the show. The wishes ruin their lives.”
“Sure, because it’s a fairy tale. They’re always so tediously moral. Nobody gets away with anything fun and all the interesting people are bad guys.
“But listen, this is different. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had a partner or a friend you could make a pact with: each of you would be granted one wish by the other. No matter what the wish was, the partner would have to do everything in his or her power, short of committing a crime, to make it happen. I wish I’d been able to do it with Dick; he would have loved the idea. What do you think?”
I ran my tongue around the inside of my cheek and watched a bunch of blackbirds flying over the snow. “It sounds like a Sophie Chapman idea. Do you want to do it with me? You’re willing to take that chance?”
“You and Dick are the only men I’ve ever trusted enough to love—besides my brother. But he’s blood, and you can’t count family. I think this is the kind of promise people wouldn’t dream of making today because there’s no trust, and let’s face it, it’s dangerous. Who knows what the other guy’ll want?”
“True. And you’re serious about this? We pledge to do what we can to make each other’s wish come true, short of murder?”
“No! We do everything we can to make it come true, not just what we can. That’s the difference. Everything.”
“One hundred percent serious?”
“A hundred percent.”
“I’ll tell you truthfully, I like the thought very much, but it does make me nervous.”
“Hey, me too! When the idea hit me, I thought about the people I know. But which ones would I trust to do this with? Only you.”
I looked at the birds again. I said yes to her deal because of the birds at that moment more than anything else. More than my love for Sophie, more than our friendship. How the birds dipped and swooped beautifully as one; all consummate faith in one another’s movements. Not having to think if going left was correct because going left was the only direction in their one grand mind then. Consummate faith. Sureness that if I ever did have something I wanted desperately, someone would care enough to work hard, perhaps even harder than I myself, to bring it about. Complete faith that they’d not ask me to do something beyond my powers for them. Like birds flying together.
“It’s a deal.”
As we shook, she craned her head back toward the tin-colored sky and said loudly, “Dick, you’re the witness. You heard every word.”
We joined hands and walked back down to Club Dread.
In the years since, neither of us had made our formal wish. Thus the moment on the hill sank back into a pleasant snapshot in my mind’s photo album. Remember that afternoon? That bench? That’s where we made our pact. Just like kids.
Only it wasn’t like kids today. Sophie was calling in the IOU, and the tone of her voice said she meant it.
“Look, Wyatt, there are now only three people in the world who matter to me. You, my brother, his wife. If I were to lose Jesse, that would take away a third of the loves I have left. If I don’t go over there to look for him, I’ll hate myself forever. But I don’t trust myself in situations like this. I get crazy and emotional and don’t have any calm places inside me to go and think or regroup.
“You do. You’re the king of cool and order. I know how sick you are. Believe me, I know. I lived with Dick, remember, right up till the end. I’ll take care of you. I swear to God I will, but I need you to go with me. If you do… Come on, you can understand.”
“I understand, but I don’t want to go. You’re creating an impossible situation—a choice between our friendship and what’s left of my health. I’m dying, and a trip like this will exacerbate things. That’s how I feel. If you insist, I’ll go. But I don’t want to and I resent you for it. There’s nothing else to say.”
Her voice came out as hard and cold as mine. “Fair enough.”
I tried on words like Austria and pack your bag as if they were clothes I was modeling in a mirror. None of them fit. I felt odd and uncomfortable in all of them. How could I do this, friend or not? You’re dying, man! People with cancer of the blood do not get up and head for the airport.
Except me.
But indignant and worried as I was, I knew I had nothing else to do. Except die. Die comfortably and safely in familiar surroundings with all the best care in the world. If Sophie hadn’t called and made her demand, what would I have planned for the rest of that day? Or week or month? Take my pills and drops as directed? Read a few pages in the book I couldn’t get interested in, eat, make some phone calls? Such dreary, dreary stuff. If the last days of my life were so precious, why was I living them indifferently? I didn’t want to travel with Sophie because I was afraid of becoming gravely ill in another country, but what difference would that make? I’d recently watched a television biography of the composer Frederick Delius. Told he was going blind, Delius had friends lead him up a favorite hill at daybreak so that he could watch the sun rise for one of the last times in his life. I loved that moment in the show, and whether or not it was true, I believed it. Now I was in much the same situation. Only when I was offered the chance to see great and possibly important things for the last time, I cringed and whined. I wanted my bed, my doctor, the dumb book on the living room table that had bored me from the first moment I’d picked it up.